[quarantine]

If you do decide to go with Linux:

- Dell XPS (mac-like comes with Linux)

- Lenovo Thinkpad (excellent Linux support, as it is used by a lot of Linux devs)

- Any of the Linux CTO laptop builders (Librem, Tuxedo, ...) will have excellent support, but will not look as good as the Dell

- Anything else: YMMV, check the reviews.

[KaiserPro]

THe support is good on the XPS. Everything works out of the box (apart from the standard linux trackpad multi touch issues.)

a word of caution, the 2019 13" has a stupid[1] keyboard layout. They cram the pageup/down keys above the left right keys. This caused huge amounts of issues for me, making it unusable. If this were to be fixed, it would be a very compelling machine.

[1]subjective

[philliphaydon]

If you get an XPS with windows. It’s a pain to install linux because of some weird Intel thing needing to be disabled first. Caused me a lot of headache. Runs great once you get past that tho.

Lenovo on the other hand. Just works.

[robert_foss]

Personally I'm on my 3rd XPS running Linux, and the install has mostly been smooth sailing.

[heelix]

The BIOS is configured for RAID rather than AHCI/SATA by default. Bumped into that with mine. It was fairly easy to modify Windows to not use the RAID version so I could boot into Linux on one drive and boot into Windows on the other. Suspect I could get Centos to go the RAID route, but did not want to mess with it.

[kinix]

I had one of the first XPSs, and it was a 'mare for the first few months - I'm kinda surprised it's still that much of an issue to be honest.

[blackrock]

I love my Lenovo T4xx. Linux was a breeze to install.

I just wish the Fn and Ctrl keys were swapped. Although you can change it in the bios.

[SweetestRug]

I did this and it was smooth sailing. All I had to do was set the hard drives from RAID to ACHI in the BIOS.

[philliphaydon]

I should have mentioned I was trying to dual boot too. And Windows doesn’t like the flat out change. You need to change the settings in windows before changing the bios. Something I didn’t need to do on my Lenovo.

[qppo]

My XPS with Linux (installed by dell, no customization except for user space packages) will freeze/stall about twice a day and needs to be rebooted with the power button, losing all unsaved work.

Dell does not offer any support for this computer's software so there's not really a remedy except keeping drivers up to date and hoping it gets fixed someday.

Would not recommend it for anything but personal work right now.

[bradwood]

Or stump up for the Precision 5540 if you have the cash. That running arch and i3 and you are cooking with gas!

[secondcoming]

I recently got a 'Build Your Own' Precision 7750. After-market RAM and SSDs were far cheaper than Dell's offering.

I'm a bit gutted though, no Ryzen CPUs were offered and considering how much I spent I won't be buying another laptop for at least 10 years.